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IBM's Watson Gets Its First Piece Of Business In Healthcare

The old Watson that beat Ken Jennings. Now it can fit into a desk drawer. (Credit: Getty Images via @daylife)

IBM‘s Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing supercomputer that scored one for Team Robot Overlord two years ago, just put out its shingle as a doctor or, more specifically, as a combination lung cancer specialist and expert in the arcane branch of health insurance known as utilization management. Thanks to a business partnership among IBM, Memorial Sloan-Kettering and WellPoint, health care providers will now be able to tap Watson’s expertise in deciding how to treat patients.

Pricing was not disclosed, but hospitals and health care networks who sign up will be able to buy or rent Watson’s advice from the cloud or their own server. Over the past two years, IBM’s researchers have shrunk Watson from the size of a master bedroom to a pizza-box-sized server that can fit in any data center. And they improved its processing speed by 240%. Now what was once was a fun computer-science experiment in natural language processing is becoming a real business for IBM and Wellpoint, which is the exclusive reseller of the technology for now. Initial customers include WestMed Practice Partners and the Maine Center for Cancer Medicine & Blood Disorders.

Even before the Jeopardy! success, IBM began to hatch bigger plans for Watson and there are few areas more in need of supercharged decision-support than health care. Doctors and nurses are drowning in information with new research, genetic data, treatments and procedures popping up daily. They often don’t know what to do, and are guessing as well as they can. WellPoint’s chief medical officer Samuel Nussbaum said at the press event today that health care pros make accurate treatment decisions in lung cancer cases only 50% of the time (a shocker to me). Watson has shown the capability (on the utilization management side) of being accurate in its decisions 90% of the time, but is not near that level yet with cancer diagnoses. Patients, of course, need 100% accuracy, but making the leap from being right half the time to being right 9 out of ten times will be a huge boon for patient care. The best part is the potential for distributing the intelligence anywhere via the cloud, right at the point of care. This could be the most powerful tool we’ve seen to date for improving care and lowering everyone’s costs via standardization and reduced error. Chris Coburn, the Cleveland Clinic’s executive director for innovations, said at the event that he fully expects Watson to be widely deployed wherever the Clinic does business by 2020.

Watson doesn’t tell a doctor what to do, it provides several options with degrees of confidence for each, along with the supporting evidence it used to arrive at the optimal treatment. Doctors can enter on an iPad a new bit of information in plain text, such as “my patient has blood in her phlegm,” and Watson within half a minute will come back with an entirely different drug regimen that suits the individual. IBM Watson’s business chief Manoj Saxena says that 90% of nurses in the field who use Watson now follow its guidance.

WellPoint will be using the system internally for its nurses and clinicians who handle utilization management, the process by which health insurers determine which treatments are fair, appropriate and efficient and, in turn, what it will cover. The company will also make the intelligence available as a Web portal to other providers as its Interactive Care Reviewer. It is targeting 1,600 providers by the end of 2013 and will split the revenue with IBM. Terms were undisclosed.

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As a medicine man I feel that this is a great way to assist doctors in making correct diagnosis. Most people would be surprised to know how many times doctors have internal struggle regarding reaching a conclusive diagnosis. Watson shall surely assist Homes!!

There are already several products (Milliman, etc) that contain a similar wealth of medical knowledge and can assist doctors and Utilization Managers in finding the recommended plan of care for any given diagnosis. Watson’s improvement on the existing products is its ability to take speech or plain text as spoken/written by people and search its databases accordingly. Existing products generally can take plain text and perform a search, but a person will have to ultimately select a matching diagnosis code for the recommendations to be returned.

Health care payors (insurance companies, plans, etc) also like this technology because if a patient complains about the care they received the payor company can say they were just following Watson’s advice.

While this machine may only be in the decision assistance mode right now we are already on a path of giving it full decision making power in the next few years. I can already see the low cost government funded clinics with Watson on staff using all of our medical records to help save money by reducing the number of physicians on staff. I can already see the government medical decision board using Watson to add the impartial voice on treatment plans for the terminally ill.

We are already on a slippery slope and once responsibility is turned over to a machine that can not “feel” the repercussions for it’s decisions then humanity is truly in danger.